U.S. officials have told CNN that the identity of the courier who led U.S. special forces to hunt and kill Osama bin Laden was a Kuwaiti named Abu Ahmad. After the U.S. established his identity back in 2007, they then began a path to the house where bin Laden lived for the past six years in the resort town Abbottabad, just 35 miles from Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital.

Analysis of assessments of detainees held at the U.S. Navy’s detention facility at Guantanamo Bay include several mentions of a man by the name of Abu Ahmad al Kuwaiti, who was close to a Kuwaiti named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who faces charges in connection with the September 11th attacks and is regarded as one of the most senior operatives in al-Qaeda. The information on the detainee assessments came from U.S. Defense Department documents published by WikiLeaks.

Since the operation that killed bin Laden in the early hours of Monday morning, U.S. officials have described the courier they were tracking as a protege of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and another senior member of al Qaeda, Abu Faraj al Libi, a Libyan detainee who was named as al-Qaeda’s third most senior leader when he was captured in May 2005. Whether or not the courier was at bin Laden’s compound during raid has yet to be confirmed. (Via CNN)